Thorns On My Rose: A Story of the Daughter of Robert Downey Jr. (EDITING)

Chapter 20 - The Last Straw

Alana-Rose's Perspective

"Yes." He breathed softly, fingers moving restlessly at his sides. I looked up through my burning eyes, my vision blurry with anger filled tears.

Chewing my lip savagely til it nearly rips under the strength of my incisors, looking down into my lap, unable to-to even comprehend what he's said.

Holy fuck.

He'd known? He'd fucking known about me and my mother all this time, and he had still chose to leave us--chose the cowards way out of a family and opted for personally written correspondence instead. Fucking letters to my goddamn mother, and it had gone on for years. Years he had the opportunity to turn it around, patch things up with my mother and resume their life together, especially after he was sober, after Iron Man and his several blockbuster hits had made him the most sought after mega star in Hollywood.

But I'd never gotten a phone call or a holiday email or a card for my birthday. I'd never seen a picture, or heard from my mom that one of her old beaus had been the fricking RDJ--he'd never been added to the 'definitely maybe' list in my head of assholes that could have been my dad.

No Daddy daughter dates. No talks about boys. No being tucked in at night and being tickled by rough, unshaven cheeks when they brushed against mine. No premature fights over boyfriends or revealing clothing. No being my readily available defense against my mother when she was being too unreasonable for the both of us.

Years of my life had passed and gone with me believing that my mother was a just single mother and my father was just some hapless, sorry bum from bar that had merely given seed---but, in fact, my father had watched the my formative pass, smiling and grinning at my accomplishments and milestones from thousands of miles away, behind closed doors marked with security detail and an overly compensating entourage.

And he'd been fine with that. More than fine. It had been his choice, his decision, his final answer and resolution to the problem that was his family: run away and leave them behind; pretend they don't really exist except for in these pictures and VHS tapes.

He never chose us, and I couldn't even begin to fathom why he hadn't or what that really meant. He'd sucked the life out of me and then came careening back--pretended he was just as clueless as I was about being my father, and he had taken me into a world that was actually, now that I think about it, a reflection of his own falsified feelings for and about me.

God, why, had I thought he was different? Why had I allowed him the wiggle room to worm his way into my heart? Why had I let him pull me in and make me believe he could fix it? That he could fix me, that this man could fix the same hole he'd created in the first place, the one that had formed after seventeen years of bitterness and self destructive tendencies based on the painstakingly developed hypothesis that love wasn't real and had nothing to do with actual feelings. Instead, it was a concept, something more like an intense infatuation between human beings rooted in curiosity or protectiveness or lust or fear--all of which had been ingrained in most of us through societal constructs that we were oblivious. And it was never, ever guaranteed.

Sure, we found love through the birth of a child or the random meeting of a stranger, or a poke request on Facebook--but it wasn't our right. It was owed.

It wasn't real.

And, just by the way, I didn't need therapy to know that it was the daddy issues that had me fucked. That was a no brainer. Suppose I was just a little too stupid to think it'd be this easy, that it'd be this sweet of a deal.